"I am a great supporter of the Common Core because it emphasizes skills. But I have a tremendous amount of difficulty grasping how we can come up with standards for all of education when we have yet to have a prolonged discussion on the purpose of education: why do we send kids to school? Everyone needs to be part of that conversation -- parents, kids, teachers, administrators, everyone. Up until the mid-nineties, the purpose of public education was to get kids ready for the workforce. We wanted kids to be successful, productive workers -- but that's not really true everywhere anymore, especially with the push toward Common Core. Are we looking at education to benefit society or individual students? Do individual students have different needs from education than society? Based on our service-oriented economy, shouldn't we be training kids to be waiters, web developers, or hotel managers? But we don't -- we give them a general education in the hopes that whatever they choose to do, we've equipped them to be successful there. And that's what I want to do. I don't want to push them in one direction or another, but I want to equip them with problem solving skills and expose them to things in the world that they wouldn't otherwise be exposed to." | by Justin Aion
Via
Todd Reimer